After two weeks of nail-biting Bitcoin noise, take a moment to think about the (paraphrased) post from “Prolific Jointz”:
“Everybody suddenly wants to ‘educate’ people about what went wrong in Bitcoin because one particular failure is trending.
Fine. Let’s educate them about the entire history.
Start on August 15, 2010, when a value overflow bug created more than 184 billion BTC in one transaction. Satoshi and the early developers patched the software, miners adopted the corrected rules, and the accepted blockchain reorganized away the invalid transaction. It was repaired, but it happened.
Then came Bitcoin Savings & Trust, which raised more than 700,000 BTC through a Ponzi scheme.
Then Mt. Gox, where hundreds of thousands of BTC were stolen over several years before the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world collapsed.
Then the 2013 accidental chain split, when incompatible software versions produced two competing blockchains and mining pools were asked to downgrade.
Then GHash.io reaching roughly half of Bitcoin’s hashrate and forcing the community to confront how centralized mining could become.
Then miners building on invalid blocks in 2015 without fully verifying what they were mining.
Then Bitfinex losing almost 120,000 BTC.
Then the block-size civil war, Bitcoin Cash, SegWit2X and a community that nearly tore itself apart over who controlled Bitcoin’s direction.
Then BitConnect.
Then the 2018 Bitcoin Core inflation vulnerability that could have allowed new coins to be created if a miner had exploited it.
Then QuadrigaCX.
Then Binance losing 7,000 BTC.
Then Celsius, FTX and all the “Bitcoin balances” customers saw on screens while companies traded, borrowed, gambled with or simply stole the real assets behind them.
Then DMM Bitcoin losing more than 4,500 BTC.
Now Coldcard, a hardware wallet promoted under ‘don’t trust, verify’ suffering a seed generation failure that remained in firmware for years and was connected to more than 1,500 stolen BTC.
These events are not all the same.
Some were failures in Bitcoin’s code.
Some were mining and governance failures.
Some were exchange hacks.
Some were Ponzi schemes.
Some were fraud, leverage and unbacked paper claims.
Some were failures of self custody products trusted by people who believed open source automatically meant someone competent had verified everything.
And that distinction matters.
Bitcoin’s 21 million protocol cap is not the same as the supply people trade in the market. Exchanges can issue balances they do not fully back. Custodians can lend the same coins. Companies can commingle deposits. Mining power can concentrate. Wallet software can fail. Markets can be manipulated even when the underlying blockchain continues producing blocks.
So yes, discuss today’s disaster.
But don’t pretend it happened in isolation, and don’t rewrite Bitcoin’s history to protect the religion.
‘Don’t trust, verify’ was never [intended] to mean:
-don’t trust the developers.
-don’t trust the exchange.
-don’t trust the hardware company.
-don’t trust the influencer.
-don’t trust the talking head who claimed he studied it for you.
[It meant use your head], study [be aware of] every success, every hack, fork, fraud, exploit, collapse and human intervention too [nothing is perfect].
Or, you can hold cuckbucks or its similarly denominated assets.
That said, Bitcoin is DEAD, long live BITCOIN!
